What is plain-english?

A writing guide that turns technical explanations into clear language for people who do not work in technology. It focuses on decisions, impact, actions, ownership, and timing.

Writing executive summaries, recommendations, status updates, and technical explanations for business, legal, compliance, or other non-technical audiences.

It removes specialist terms and brings the important decision or recommendation to the beginning. This helps non-technical readers understand what matters and what they need to do.

plain-english — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by pantheon-org

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add pantheon-org/tekhne --skill plain-english

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pantheon-org/tekhne

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pantheon-org/tekhne/plain-english/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/pantheon-org/tekhne/plain-english)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pantheon-org/tekhne/plain-english"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pantheon-org/tekhne/plain-english/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pantheon-org/tekhne/plain-english"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pantheon-org/tekhne/plain-english.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 128 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,334 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits

NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026

How audits are shown

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00128	$0.01334
Opus 5	$0.00064	$0.00667
Sonnet 5	$0.00026	$0.00267
Haiku 4.5	$0.00013	$0.00133

Measured 9d ago against content hash ab7200cffb95, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

plain-english scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/documentation/plain-english/SKILL.md · 148 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 148 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Plain English Writing

Translates technical content into decision-ready communication for non-technical stakeholders.

When to Use

Apply when writing for: executives, business managers, compliance/legal, or cross-functional stakeholders without the requesting team's domain knowledge.

When Not to Use

Skip when writing for engineers or technical specialists. You may optionally apply selective translation for mixed audiences; consider keeping technical depth for peer reviews or developer-facing docs.

Mindset

Technical writing optimises for completeness. Plain-English writing optimises for decisions.

Before writing a single word, ask:

"What does this person need to decide or do — and what is the minimum information required for that?"

The single most reliable fix: move the recommendation to sentence one. Everything else is secondary.

Decision Framework

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  OPENING (required)                          │
│  Problem + Business impact + Action needed   │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  SUPPORTING CONTEXT (only if needed)         │
│  Background / Options / Tradeoffs / Timeline │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  APPENDIX (optional)                         │
│  Technical detail / Metrics / Implementation │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘

If a reader only reads the opening, they must still know what to do.

Workflow

Step 1: Identify Audience

executive (zero jargon) | manager (minimal jargon) | compliance/legal (tech translated) | cross-functional (inline definitions). See references/constraints-and-fallbacks.md for the audience depth guide.

If unknown: Audience: unknown. Applying manager-level clarity (fallback).

Step 2: Define the Outcome

One sentence — what must the reader decide or do? Write it before drafting.

Step 3: Draft Key Message First

Read the full file on GitHub · 148 lines

Files

What ships with it

31 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

9d ago First seen · 148 lines · 128 tokens per session scan A ab7200cffb95

Subscribe to this mod's changes

plain-english is a skill published in the GitHub repository pantheon-org/tekhne (10 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 128 tokens to every session and 1,334 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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plain-english